Upgrading from Ubuntu 18.10

Set the "Notify me of a new Ubuntu version" dropdown menu to "For any new version".

Press Alt+F2 and type in "update-manager -c" (without the quotes) into the command box.

Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release '19.04' is available.

If not you can also use "/usr/lib/ubuntu-release-upgrader/check-new-release-gtk"

Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

To upgrade on a server system:

Install the update-manager-core package if it is not already installed.

Make sure the Prompt line in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades is set to normal.

Launch the upgrade tool with the command do-release-upgrade.

Follow the on-screen instructions.

Note that the server upgrade will use GNU screen and automatically re-attach in case of dropped connection problems.

There are no offline upgrade options for Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server. Please ensure you have network connectivity to one of the official mirrors or to a locally accessible mirror and follow the instructions above.

Upgrades on i386

Users of the i386 architecture will not be allowed to upgrade to Ubuntu 19.04 as dropping support for that architecture is being evaluated and users of it should not be stranded on a release with a shorter support window than the release they are already running.

New features in 19.04

Updated Packages

Linux kernel 🐧

Ubuntu 19.04 is based on the Linux release series 5.0. It includes support for AMD Radeon RX Vega M graphics processor, complete support for the Raspberry Pi 3B and the 3B+, Qualcomm Snapdragon 845, many USB 3.2 and Type-C improvements, Intel Cannonlake graphics, significant power-savings improvements, P-State driver support for Skylake X servers, POWER memory protection keys support, KVM support for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization, enablement of Shared Memory Communications remote and direct (SMC-R/D), Open for Business (OFB), and zcrypt on IBM Z among with many other improvements since the v4.15 kernel shipped in 18.04 LTS.

The Wayland session can now be scaled between 100% and 200% in 25% increments.

Experimental support in the Xorg session can be enabled to achieve the same. Read more here

New sound configuration panel making it easier to select your input and output devices

Changes to GNOME Initial Setup to add more settings up front and make it easier to enable location services (for example, to allow automatic timezone switching)

Tracker is now included by default. This allows the desktop to keep track of recently used files and improves searching.

Right click handling is now "area" by default. This allows both two-finger right clicking and clicking in the bottom right corner of the touchpad

alt-tab handling now switches windows by default. Switching applications by default can be done with super-tab

Preview order of windows in the dock is now static and based on the order in which the windows were added

IWD can now be enabled for use with Network Manager. IWD is a new alternative to wpa supplicant and is in testing for consideration in the future.

Installing Ubuntu Desktop on vmware will now automatically install the open-vm-tools package to improve integration.

The Yaru theme has seen further refinement and updates and includes a new icon theme.

Safe Graphics Mode. A new option is added to the Grub menu which will boot with "NOMODESET" on. This may help you resolve issues on certain graphics cards and allow you to boot and install any propriatary drivers needed by your system.

The latest releases of Firefox (66.0) and LibreOffice (6.2.2) are available and installed by default.

Ubuntu Server

qemu

Migrations from former versions are supported just as usual. When upgrading it is always recommended to upgrade the machine types allowing guests to fully benefit from all the improvements and fixes of the most recent version.

Qemu now has virglrenderer enabled which allows to create a virtual 3D GPU inside qemu virtual machines. That is inferior to GPU passthrough, but can be handy if the platform used lacks the capability for classic PCI passthrough as well as more modern mediated devices.

libvirt

libvirt was updated to version 5.0. See the upstream change log for details since version 4.6 that was in Cosmic.

Among many other changes worth to mention is the ability to have GL enabled graphics as well as mediated devices to be configured while still being guarded by custom apparmor profiles generated per guest. This is required for the use of gpu based mediated devices as well as VirGL mentioned above in the qemu section.

dpdk

Ubuntu includes 18.11.x the latest stable release branch of DPDK. The very latest (non-stable) version being 19.02 was not chosen for downstream projects of DPDK (like Open vSwitch) not being compatible.

DPDK dependencies were reorganized into more or less common/tested components. Due to that most DPDK installations will now have a smaller installation footprint and less potentially active code to care about.

samba

Samba was updated to version 4.10.x, and one of the big changes here is python3 support. In Disco, samba and its dependencies are all python3 only now, with the exception of tdb. tdb still builds a python2 package, namely python-tdb, but all the others, including samba itself, are python3 only.

open-vm-tools

To run well integrated as VMware guest Ubuntu 19.04 comes with the latest open-vm-tools version 10.3.10. Details about the changes can be found in the upstream changelog

Raspberry Pi 🥧

Ubuntu 19.04 comes with an easy way of enabling Bluetooth support on the raspi3 ubuntu-server preinstalled images; install the pi-bluetooth package (now available in multiverse) with sudo apt install pi-bluetooth.

Please note that supported Pi devices which have Bluetooth (at the time of writing, the Raspberry Pi 3B, 3B+, and 3A+) can have either serial console or Bluetooth support enabled at any given time (not both). With the pi-bluetooth package installed, edit /boot/firmware/config.txt and set enable_uart=1 to enable serial console, or enable_uart=0 to enable Bluetooth. The change will take effect after the next reboot.

OpenStack Stein

Ubuntu 19.04 includes the latest OpenStack release, Stein, including the following components:

Open vSwitch

s390x

Since s390x supports 1M huge pages (as well as 2GB huge pages, if requested) the support for libhugetlbfs (v2.19) was added for native s390x (1823132) as well as for KVM (1803315), so that customers running workloads with large memory footprints can benefit from improved memory performance.

Now, having the kernel infrastructure (since 4.17) as well as the s390-tool in place, the I/O device auto-configuration feature is ready to use. (1776631)

With (1784643) Ubuntu Server is now prepared (with lib-zfcp-hbaapi) for port speed capabilities of 32GB line speed.

The pass through capabilities for cryptographic resources got enhanced (1787405).

The upgrade to qemu 3.1+ (1786956) and the current kernel allows to make use of the latest KVM features for s390x.

For example, but not limited, to PCI passthrough support for KVM (1799446) and support for configurable virtio-crypto (1802514).

The enablement for virtio-gpu for s390x (1799467) and (1799472) now allows to better administer KVM virtual machines with UI based tools.

PCI Virtual function enablement and s390x-specific modifications were added as well (1814684).

qeth performance (OSA and Hipersockets) got improved by general code changes (1814899) and link speed enhancements were made in kernel (1814891) and on the tooling side (1814892) - in preparation for future network hardware.

New instruction support was added to binutils, leading to improved performance with that enhanced instruction support (1815040).

The new glibc version 2.29 (1817523) has several minor improvements for s390x, and with that vx and vxe are now marked as important hwcap, to be able to provide differently tuned shared libraries (1821200).

The upgrade of cryptsetup to 2.1.0 comes with several fixes, like for the on-disk header size calculation for the LUKS2 format (1814769), (1815484).

That said s390-tools were upgraded to 2.8.0.

And finally support was added for automatic usage of zkey and pervasive encryption by the installer (1766865). Now when doing an (LPAR or z/VM guest) installation and selecting "Guided - use entire disk and setup encrypted LVM" zkey will be automatically used - in case a CryptoExpress domain is available with a master key set.

Known issues

As is to be expected, with any release, there are some significant known bugs that users may run into with this release of Ubuntu 19.04. The ones we know about at this point (and some of the workarounds), are documented here so you don't need to spend time reporting these bugs again:

Desktop

When selecting 3rd party drivers during install there is a long pause before install proceeds. This is the ubuntu-drivers tool refreshing it's cache. Please wait a couple of minutes and install will continue normally. (bug 1824905)

For secure-boot enabled systems with Broadcom wireless, even after selecting the proprietary drivers during the installation, the bcmwl dkms module can end up left uninstalled after reboot (resulting in no working wifi). This is caused by a dkms tooling regression. As a workaround the bcmwl-kernel-source package needs to be reinstalled on the target system sudo apt-get install --reinstall bcmwl-kernel-source. (bug 1821823)

Official flavours

The release notes for the official flavours can be found at the following links: